This volume seeks to explore the meaning of space artefacts, both as products of particular historical settings and as windows for understanding technological and cultural change. Seven contributors, most of whom are museum curators, address these challenges through the history of particular artefacts, highlighting differences and commonalities across technologies, institutions, professional communities, projects and geographical contexts. The essays sample the broad range of space activity - from launch vehicles to satellites and space capsules, from military to commercial and scientific purposes. They include an exploration of the Black Arrow rocket project in Britain, the European Launcher Development Organization, NASA’s Mercury capsules, the Iridium commercial global satellite communications system, the Soviet space programme, and rocket recovery in Australia.

What stories can space artefacts tell? What kinds of information and experiences might real objects convey that images and representations do not? Do they speak for themselves, or do they represent a dense sediment of human agency, culture and technology needing interpretation by experts? And, more particularly, in what ways do space artefacts originating in Cold War culture pose historiographic questions and issues that do not arise from artefacts with other histories? Questions such as these speak to the Artefacts series’ purpose: To explore the overlapping interests of museums and historians of science and technology in understanding artefacts, as well as presenting that understanding to scholarly and general publics.